Sometimes the Answer Is “Yes”

As the Antiplanner has noted before, Betteridge’s law states that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But there are always exceptions, and one can be found above a recent Seattle Times article about a recent light-rail ballot measure, asking “Did Sound Transit mislead legislators and voters?”

The Antiplanner doesn’t like to use generalities, but one that is even more reliable than Betteridge’s Law is that almost everything light-rail advocates say is untrue. Contrary to what they claim or imply, light rail is not light (light-rail cars weigh more than heavy-rail cars), it’s not high-capacity transit (buses can move four times as many people in the same corridor), it’s not fast (averaging less than 20 mph), and it’s far from efficient.

Last November’s ballot measure, known as ST3, asked Seattle voters to agree to pay $54 billion in taxes to get 62 miles of light rail and a few new commuter trains. That’s an unbelievable amount of money for so little in return.

The Antiplanner recently read a transportation study of Minneapolis-St. Paul, an urban area about the same size as Seattle (both roughly 3 million people in a thousand square miles of land). The report estimated that, for $43 billion, the Twin Cities could build enough new roads to completely eliminate congestion–but lamented that the region only had about $8 billion to spend over the next ten years (and because the Twin Cities is also under the light-rail spell, most of that will go for light rail, not new roads).

If $43 billion could completely eliminate congestion, a proposal to spend $54 billion on transportation would have to do a lot to be worthwhile: it should not only eliminate congestion, it should improve safety, reduce air pollution, and save huge amounts of energy. But Sound Transit’s ST3 isn’t going to do any of those things. Far from eliminating congestion, it will make it worse. Far from improving safety, light rail is the most dangerous form of motorized urban travel. Far from reducing air pollution and saving energy, rail construction will consume trillions of BTUs of carbon-dioxide-emitting energy, and the annual savings from light-rail operations (if there are any savings at all) will never repay that cost.
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The big selling point for light rail was that it would be the “solution to horrendous traffic congestion.” King County executive Dow Constantine (who is on Sound Transit’s board) claimed that light rail could carry “the equivalent of adding 14 new lanes to Interstate 5 through the heart of downtown Seattle.” In fact, the average light-rail line carries one-fifth of a freeway lane’s worth of people.

When pressed, light-rail proponents admitted that it won’t relieve congestion, it would merely provide an alternative to congestion. But that didn’t stop Sound Transit and its allies from playing the congestion card as often as they could.

Observers noted during the campaign that Sound Transit was being deceptive even though, as a public agency, it wasn’t supposed to lobby the public. It hired a consulting firm to “educate” the public. That firm in turn donated money to candidates that supported light rail.

The passage of ST3 raised increased sales taxes, property taxes, and vehicle registration fees to pay for light-rail lines that won’t relieve congestion. Sadly, now that the campaign is over, it is unlikely that any legislative inquiry will make much difference for Seattle. But it is still worth conducting such an inquiry if only to inform voters in other places of the deceptions they will face when light rail is on their ballots.